To be clear, to insist that we face ugly facts about our own failures, and recognize others’ successes, is not to imply any moral equivalence. government remain in denial? Who failed to prepare for the next pathogen after we saw earlier versions of this movie with the MERS outbreak in 2012, Swine Flu in 2009, and SARS in 2003? In a world where South Korea began testing 10,000 citizens a day within weeks of patient zero-and can now do 20,000 a day-who is still floundering with one excuse after another? How many weeks after countries like Singapore and South Korea began implementing emergency measures did the U.S. It is our own failures to mobilize a response proportionate to the threat. The urgent challenge America faces in attempting to defeat coronavirus is not China. President Trump insists on calling the pathogen the “Chinese virus.” A leading Republican Senator fed social media conspiracy theorists by suggesting that the virus had escaped from a Chinese bio-weapons lab.Īdults should move on. Despite the Chinese government’s best efforts to re-write the narrative, it cannot disguise the fact that there is much in this case for which China deserves blame.īut the effort by many in Washington as well as the Blob to make this the primary storyline is escapist-an attempt to duck responsibilities for their own failures. Who failed to nip the crisis in the bud? Chinese authoritarianism has displayed all its ugly features in suppressing initial reports, delaying transmission of bad news to superiors, and dissembling. Where did the coronavirus first appear? In China. If central casting were searching for a villain, China is fit for the role. When a crisis strikes, the first question many ask is: Who is to be blamed? As President Kennedy noted in explaining the necessity for coexistence with the Soviet Union in facing mutual, existential nuclear danger: “We all breathe the same air. The inescapable fact is that all 7.7 billion people alive today inhabit one small planet Earth. When an outbreak becomes a pandemic infecting citizens around the world, since no nation can hermetically seal its borders, every country is at risk. When droplets from an infected patient who sneezes are inhaled by a healthy individual, the biological impact is essentially identical whether the person is American, Italian, or Chinese. Viruses carry no passports, have no ideology, and respect no borders. The question is whether despite this reality, when confronting specific threats neither can defeat by itself, statesmen can be wise enough to find ways for rivals to simultaneously be partners. from our position at the top of every pecking order. This is an inescapable consequence of structural realities: however anyone tries to disguise or deny it, a rapidly rising China really is threatening to displace the U.S. and China will be a defining feature of their relations as far as any eye can see. The increasingly ruthless rivalry between the U.S. For America to defeat the coronavirus and return to a version of life as it was before this nightmare, should we identify China as an adversary against whom to mobilize? Or alternatively, must we recognize it as a partner whose cooperation is essential for our own victory? While the consensus in Washington has moved sharply toward defining China as part of the problem, the fact is that we cannot succeed in this war against coronavirus without making China part of the solution.
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